The Face of Heaven

by Murray Pura

  Nathaniel looked so awkward and embarrassed, his eyes and mouth drooping, his face reddening, that Lyndel found she could only glare at him for a few moments.

  “You scared me half to death,” she said, her eyes and lips narrow.

  “I wanted…to surprise you.”

  “Well, Nathaniel King, you certainly succeeded at that.”

  He released his grip on her arm and stood back. “You were having time alone and with God, it seems. I should go. Once again, I’m sorry. I will be by tomorrow evening if you still wish it.”

  Lyndel regained her composure, turned her glare into a small smile, and said, “You may come for supper.”

  When he nodded and smiled, then turned to go, Lyndel said, “You don’t need to go. Stay, please…for a while. I’ve had quite enough time alone praying prayers and thinking thoughts. Some human company would be welcome.”

  “Are you sure? It was not my intention to intrude—”

  “You’re not intruding. Stop being a gentleman, please, Nathaniel, and go back to being my brother’s best friend—and my new friend.”

  A small smile went over his face. “All right. Gut. How are you, despite everything—despite today being the day of the funeral?”

  She paused, then said, “On the one hand, Charlie is with the Jesus whose words he loved to hear me read. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel he left us too soon. And then there is Moses Gunnison—I can’t stop thinking about him and wondering how he’s faring on that Virginia plantation.”

  “I know.”

  “And you, Nathaniel, how is it with you today?”

  He shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. His eyes were dark under the broad brim of his hat, raindrops falling from its edge. “Would you mind walking with me? We can follow the creek for a while, perhaps for miles.”

  “Miles?” She smiled at him, the rain beading on her face. “Do you have a lot to say?”

  “Depends.”

  They began to make their way side by side, she with her hands folded under her apron, he with his still in his pockets. For a long minute nothing was said and there was just the sound of their boots in the mud and wet grass of the field. She glanced up at him.

  “Are you waiting for me?” she asked.

  He shook his head, suddenly gray and somber as the weather. “I’m not sure how to begin. I wonder what you will think of me.”

  “Well, once you start we can find out. Is this the big important thing you wanted to tell me?”

  “Ja, ja, I guess it is.” He puffed his cheeks with a breath and then blew it out rapidly.

  “If it’s that difficult to get out perhaps you can tell me something else in the meantime.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “You whispered in Charlie’s ear. You put a slip of paper in his coffin.”

  He glanced at her. “So closely you were watching?”

  “Indeed I was.”

  “I told him…that where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty—from the Bible—and on the paper I wrote some of the words from a song the slaves sing while they work.”

  “And what were the words?”

  Nathaniel cleared his throat. “Some of these mornings, bright and fair, I thank God I’m free at last. Going to meet King Jesus in the air, I thank God I’m free at last. Free at last, free at last, I thank God I’m free at last.”

  Lyndel gazed at him, her mouth partly open. “You astonish me, Nathaniel King. Where on earth did you learn that? It’s beautiful.”

  “I…I just thought…I could picture Charlie singing it while he was in the fields—”

  “What a—different sort of man you are. I never guessed it.” She smiled. “But it is a good different, Nathaniel King.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose the leadership think of me as something of a wild young colt, what with my talk of clearing temples and making whips.”

  “Well, it’s in the Bible, Nathaniel, so they can’t say too much, except perhaps that clearing the temple was the task Jesus was called to perform as the Son of God, not you.”

  “Your father told me over the meal that I was free to leave for Indiana, so they can’t be too badly disposed toward me.”

  “Put your fears aside. I’m sure the pastors have a high opinion of you. My father does too. I hope telling you this doesn’t swell your head.” Her eyes smiled along with her lips. “It must be very exciting for you. When do you plan to leave?”

  “My father asked me to stay on until the seeding of the barley, oats, and wheat is completed, so I’ll be here at least another three weeks, perhaps as long as a month.”

  “Oh, will that have you champing at the bit?”

  “Four months ago, three months ago, even a few days ago, yes. Now I’m content to leave when my timing is God’s timing. You know, I thought it would be a good idea to see how another Amish community lived out its faith, one that was far away from Lancaster County, and to find out if I feel the same way about my beliefs in Indiana as I do in Pennsylvania. In addition, I thought I might…meet someone…”

  He paused and Lyndel felt a sharp pang run through her. The sensation was annoying and she frowned. What did it matter to her if Nathaniel King found an Amish woman to marry in Indiana? Up until a day or two ago the only thing the two of them had had in common was her brother Levi. Nathaniel caught her frown and wished he could retract his words.

  “I’m sorry,” he said and watched her blue eyes darken to black in response.

  “What on earth do you have to be sorry about?” she snapped.

  “I didn’t mean you to think I’ve never noticed you.”

  She stopped walking. “Really, Nathaniel, what are you talking about? Notice me in what way? Haven’t I always simply been your friend’s sister?”

  “That’s true, but—”

  “So why should I care if you run off to find yourself a bride west of the Ohio River?”

  Her vehemence startled herself as well as Nathaniel. Confused at the strength of the reaction storming up inside her at his words, she stood and watched while he started and stopped a sentence three or four times, the words always dying on his lips. Abruptly she turned around and began striding back the way they had come.

  “This whole thing is ridiculous!” she called back over her shoulder. “Talking to each other at all was a mistake! Please don’t come calling tomorrow evening! You stay Levi’s dearest friend and I’ll stay his sister and that’s the best we can hope for!”

  “It’s just that I never knew how to tell my best friend’s sister how beautiful she was!” Nathaniel blurted as she strode away. “How do you do that with someone you’ve always teased and called ‘Tomatoes’?”

  Lyndel stopped and turned around, her mouth open. “What?”

  Nathaniel’s face was flushed again. “How do you…how do you tell someone who was always the red-haired nuisance that she is a woman now—and a remarkably beautiful woman at that?”

  Lyndel felt the blood come into her own face.

  “I can’t even tell you when it started—this change in how I thought of you—but on Tuesday, when I saw Lyndel Keim take charge of the situation surrounding Charlie and Moses, when I saw the risks she took—” Nathaniel shrugged and smiled in a weak, lopsided way. “Was there ever anything on God’s green earth more beautiful than you with your eyes ablaze? And not just your eyes—your whole face and body were on fire. How do you talk to someone nicknamed ‘Tomatoes’ about things like that?”

  Lyndel felt like ice, then flame, then ice again. Her mind had stopped. Nothing came to her so she continued to stare at him and dared not speak. He bent down, picked some hay, and rolled it around in his fingers.

  “So I thought the hanging, the funeral, the pain, that it would cool everything down and put all my feelings in their proper place.” He kept looking at the stalks of hay in his fingers. “But it’s just getting worse. So maybe now I’m running to Indiana to get away from this…sudden beauty…who is my closest friend’s sister. A
t the same time, I want to call on her. What do you think I should do, Lyndel Keim? What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

  Lyndel found that she was finally able to focus her thoughts. This involved stepping toward him and placing her hand on his arm. It also involved smiling at him with all the richness and depth that was inside her and, at that moment, burning through her blood.

  “Well, if she’s truly that beautiful,” she told him in a quiet voice, “then I would throw all caution to the wind and I would call. Yes, Nathaniel King, if I were in your shoes, that’s what I would do. And this time, considering the strength of your feelings, you might contemplate bringing roses instead of snapdragons, lovely as snapdragons are. The only flower I can think of that goes with the sorts of things you are saying to a woman are roses, whether that woman is Amish or not.”

  5

  “Bishop Keim! Bishop Keim! They have shelled Fort Sumter and the commander of the fort has surrendered!”

  Lyndel was up in her room letting her sister Becky comb out her long red hair when Joshua Yoder drove up to their barn shouting and calling her father’s name. She and Becky ran to the window and looked down as their father came quickly from behind the house where he had been piling firewood.

  “What is this hollering about, Mr. Yoder?” he demanded. “Calm yourself.”

  It seemed to Lyndel that Joshua practically stood to attention before her father. “The South bombarded the fort in Charleston Harbor, sir. It surrendered last Saturday on the 13th. President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion, and when Virginia got word of it their government took a vote and they seceded from the Union yesterday.”

  “I knew about the surrender, young man—may God help us—everyone knew about it by Monday. But I have not heard about the call to arms or Virginia’s secession.”

  “We’ve been too busy with spring planting and our own affairs but all Elizabethtown is buzzing. I have papers here from Boston and Philadelphia and, look, the Daily Dispatch from Richmond for Wednesday the 17th. They say more states will be joining the Confederacy.”

  Lyndel watched her father take the papers from Joshua’s hands. A coldness came into her arms and chest. She had hoped the fort’s surrender would be the end of it, that people would realize things had gotten out of hand and wiser men would put a stop to further violence. But now the president was calling up militia. Why would he do that unless he expected a battle? She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the windowpane.

  “What’s the matter, Lyndy?” asked Becky. “Do you feel sick?”

  “Yes, I do a little.”

  “Do you want me to get Mama?”

  Lyndel pulled her head away from the glass. “Thank you, Becky, but this is not something mother’s medicines can fix.”

  “Can Nathaniel help?” Becky smiled a quick little smile. “I know he’s coming again tonight.”

  “Oh, Becky, it doesn’t take a great talent to figure that out. He has dropped by almost every evening for the past two weeks.”

  “And not to see Levi either.”

  “No? He and Levi went out in the wagon two nights ago.”

  “Once. You have been out in the buggy four times with Nathaniel.”

  Lyndel reached down and messed her sister’s hair. “Who’s counting?”

  “I’m counting.”

  “So who taught you to count? Stop going to school.”

  The first time Nathaniel had come to call, the day after the funeral and their walk in the hayfield, he had indeed brought her the roses she’d asked for, holding them behind his back. She had protested she had just been teasing him and hadn’t really wanted expensive flowers—the Amish community would look down on such an extravagant gift. Then he had brought them out from hiding and she saw they were young wild roses, very pink, very small, half of the bouquet still buds.

  “They are not so much, I guess,” he’d told her.

  But Lyndel had been as ecstatic as a ten-year-old girl with a sweetheart, even rushing the flowers to her mother who was working in the kitchen. “Mama, look, Nathaniel has brought me wild roses.”

  Her mother had smiled broadly. “Where does a young man find roses so early in April?”

  Nathaniel was in the doorway, feeling oddly out of place for the first time at the Keim house. “Mrs. Keim, ma’am, there is an ash heap behind our barn and I have often seen them growing there spring after spring. I just had no good reason to pick any until today.”

  “So my daughter is a good reason?”

  He laughed. “It suddenly occurred to me over the past couple of days that, yes, she is a very good reason. I’m just sorry it took me so many years to finally figure it out.”

  Lyndel and Nathaniel had not talked much about what was happening in America, preferring to discuss their feelings for one another, feelings that seemed to have just dropped down out of heaven, and childhood memories of playing together with Levi and other Amish boys and girls. But the political events had continued to intrude on them all the same. Her father fretted that war might come, a war that would ravage the land and kill thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. Often he asked Lyndel to excuse Nathaniel so he could join Levi and himself at the kitchen table and talk about what the Amish must do and also to pray. She would wait in her room, choosing not to hide on the landing and listen in. Her father always sent Becky to knock on her door when they were done. Then she would come down and Nathaniel would be standing on the porch, smiling when she stepped outside and joined him.

  “What do you find to talk about night after night?” she asked.

  “It is the same thing. Good reasons or not, slavery or not, the breakup of the nation or not, the Amish do not bear arms.”

  “Don’t you agree?”

  “Sure, I agree. It is not gut to see people die, is it? Remember when Old Man Zedekiah fell off the roof of his barn? Or Matthew Yoder drowned and we saw them pull his body out of the river? Who in their right mind wants war and death?”

  “But?” For she already knew him well enough to know he was holding something back.

  He hesitated. Then blurted, “There is the way Charlie was killed and the reason he was killed. How long does that go on?”

  “So long as God lets it go on.”

  “Ja? Or does he want us to do something about it? Does God come in a mist and plant our corn for us? Harvest our wheat while we watch? Hitch our horses to our wagons and plows and carriages? So why do we think he will stop evil without our hands and feet and hearts?”

  The day Joshua Yoder roared into the yard with his newspapers like a nineteenth-century Paul Revere, as Papa grumbled later, Nathaniel also arrived in a hurry and asked, in a tight voice, if Lyndel could go for a drive with him. They hadn’t even turned onto the main road, a soft blue and red sky spread in the west before them, when he said to her in an agitated voice, “My brother Corinth has run off to Harrisburg to join the army.”

  This, of course, explained Nathaniel’s mood to Lyndel in an instant—or, at least, most of it. “What? Isn’t this the second time?”

  “Right. He tried to do it last year when South Carolina and Mississippi seceded.”

  “Are you going to go and look for him?”

  “Papa and my other brother, Simon, they left on the train this morning. Papa hopes to find him before the community finds out. But I think that’s a futile wish. He went with another boy from Elizabethtown and that boy’s parents have been telling everyone who will listen that it’s not their son’s fault, that Corinth was the bad egg. I’m sure your father will find out before the morning milking.”

  “How old is Corinth?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “But looks nineteen.”

  “Yes, so who knows if he even is in Harrisburg anymore? They’re forming militias everywhere. He could be in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, someplace he thinks it will be harder for us to locate him. I wish I knew his reasons for doing this.”

  “Maybe they are the same as your r
easons.”

  “Me?” Nathaniel glanced over at her. “I don’t want to join the army.”

  Lyndel raised her eyebrows and made what Nathaniel was already calling her pixie face. “Perhaps not. But you want to end slavery.”

  Nathaniel snorted. “I doubt Corinth’s ambitions are so lofty. My sense of it is he wants to wear a uniform and have girls toss flowers at him as he marches down the street with his regiment. Then he wants to lick the South single-handed and become a hero. After that, he will return to Elizabethtown with fame and fortune.”

  “Well, he is a handsome boy—all the girls think so. And he is always respectful and has a big heart. I can well imagine the girls of Pennsylvania would toss flowers his way. But surely they won’t sign him up.”

  “Of course they’ll sign him up. The president wants every able body he can get. Tall and strong and quick as he is, they’ll slap him in a uniform and ship him off for training overnight.”

  “Will you be going to help your father and brother?”

  “On Saturday, ja. But Simon has to return first. We won’t leave Mama without a man around the house.”

  “Other families would lend her a hand.”

  “Of course. But we don’t want anyone to know.” He shook his head. “So what does it matter? Your father will know by morning milking, I reckon.”

  The sunset had deepened its colors and added purple. Nathaniel pulled the buggy over to the side of the road.

  “Look at that. Enough talk about armies and soldiers and rumors of war. Do you see that bit of cloud on our left?”

  “No.”

  “That one. It’s the same blazing color as your hair.”

  She laughed. “Oh, it is not, Nathaniel. You exaggerate. Besides, what do you know about my hair? It is always up and the kapp covers most of it.”

  “I see plenty. Besides, your kapp has blown off on more than one occasion.”

  She looked at him in astonishment. “What? You have been keeping track?”

  “Last fall. At the October bonfire. Off it went in a stiff breeze that I thanked God for. And some of your pins came loose too, remember?”